Wednesday, May 27, 2009

In his usual brilliance, Rush Limbaugh said yesterday that he hopes Sonia Sotomayor fails.

In case you missed it - Sotomayor, a federal appeals court judge who was first appointed to the bench by Republican George H. W. Bush, is President Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court. Her nomination was announced at a press conference yesterday morning. Hours later, Limbaugh was lashing out on his radio show:

Do I want her to fail? Yeah. Do I want her to fail to get on the court? Yes. She'd be a disaster on the Court.

Do I still want to Obama to fail as President? Yeah, -- AP, you getting this?

He's gonna fail anyway, but the sooner the better here so that as little damage can be done to the country.

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Once again, Kim Jong-il is testing the resolve of the international community. The latest North Korean nuclear provocation - an underground detonation yesterday - is the biggest trial of the Obama administration's foreign policy and of China's newfound global status to date.

The stakes are high not only because Pyongyang's provocations undermine security in northeast Asia, but also because a critical issue facing the US is nuclear proliferation to Iran. Should North Korea acquire the status of a nuclear-weapons state, any effort to prevent the nuclearization of Iran would lose validity. Additionally the prospect of a nuclear Iran could unravel U.S. Middle East policy, threatening the survival of Israel as well as the security of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf oil-exporting states. For China, the stakes in North Korea are no less important. It has banked its credibility on restraining Pyongyang through the diplomatic process of the six-party talks on Kim’s nuclear program.

The Kim family dynasty's determination to secure its survival through the acquisition of nuclear weapons not only threatens South Korea, but also may provoke Japan (the only country that suffered an atomic bombing) to weaponize its advanced nuclear technology. Yet Kim has success doing what he has been doing in the past – winning foreign aid to stave off his people's hunger and provoking diplomatic apoplexy to feed his megalomania.

A unscrupulous dictator, Kim bankrolls his state by counterfeiting U.S. currency and the export of narcotics. He has no fuel for his factories and no foodstuff to feed his people yet finds the time to kidnap teenagers from the beaches of Japan. He goes through the motions of building nuclear reactors, then wins subsidized oil shipments from the outside world in return for suspending construction. With thousands of land-based missiles pointed at South Korea and 1.2 million soldiers under arms, Kim has long had the West over a barrel.

The response to the removal of North Korea from the U.S. list of countries supporting terrorism has been for Kim to renew his campaign of nuclear blackmail. He has no fear of the UN Security Council, whose resolutions he has defied on multiple occasions in the past five years.

With yesterday’s events broadcast through the global airways, North Korea created critical mass. No doubt a nuclear arms race in northeast Asia would undermine the U.S.-Japan security treaty and inflame a fear of Japanese militarism in the rest of Asia, especially in China, where bitter memories of Japan's aggression simmer just below the surface. It’s pretty safe to say that a scramble to acquire a nuclear stockpile in any region of the world is not what the international community is hoping for.

The only way to restrain Kim from his course is the joint and explicit cooperation of the rest of the participants in the six-party talks, led by China and the United States and supported by Russia, Japan and South Korea. China's swift condemnation of this week's nuclear test by North Korea signals that its patience is at an end.

In the coming days, we will see whether the international community can rise to the challenge. The limits of incentive-based diplomacy have been reached. The world must now tolerate imposing painful sanctions on Pyongyang. The price of inaction is too high. The risk of a war that would once again devastate the Korean Peninsula has deterred any military option. So it would seem that only close co-ordination between China and the United States to devise sanctions (such as a total energy embargo on a state that has no domestic source of oil) might constrain the continued operation of the North Korean regime without firing a shot. However it could also provoke a suicidal attack on South Korea or Japan from a power-crazed and desperate neighbour.

Kim threatens the world with the push of a button out of weakness, not strength. The world may ultimately be forced into an uncomfortable and uncharacteristic game of brinkmanship, because clearly it seems the international community is running out of options.

Monday, May 25, 2009

With hits from around the world, Lopez started blogging in December of 2006 at amis95.blogspot.com

Charming readers with a homely mix of memories and chat, one of her entries reads "My grandson gave me this blog when I was 95 on December 23 2006 and my life changed, since that day I've had 1,570,784 visits from bloggers from 5 continents who have cheered up my old age."

Writing about everything from her first-hand experiences on historic events during the Spanish Civil War, years of dictatorship under General Francisco Franco to her opinions about current Spanish politics - people described her funny and accessible. Lopez, who dictated her entries to her grandson Daniel because she suffered from cataracts, became a nationally loved figure in Spain. As her fame spread, Lopez became an unlikely campaigner for digital rights for older people, and even took tea with the Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the Spanish Prime Minister.

In one of her last posts, in February this year, she wrote: "When I'm on the internet, I forget about my illness. The distraction is good for you – being able to communicate with people. It wakes up the brain, and gives you great strength." Lopez became the world's oldest blogger on the death of 108-year-old Australian Oliver Riley in June 2008. Twitter's oldest microblogger is the 104-year-old Briton Ivy Bean, who keeps her 14,600 followers entertained at twitter.com/ivybean104.

A banner on Lopez's site read "Rest in Peace," with nearly 500 messages mourning her death and includes the following message from her family:

María Amelia rest in peace where she always wanted to, in Pedra de Abalar, in her town of Muxia (Galicia) where she was born and where she spent the best moments of her youth.

Her family, our family, we want to thank all of you those 880 blog's days that became very successful, and all these sanples of love and support that made her happy and were vital support to enjoy more than ever her last years.

The truth is that this is the most difficult post that I have ever written. I already knew that I should write it one day and here I am.

I'm not sad at all. I do not know why, but I'm not. Life does not last 150 years, and grandmother gave us many health scare. But life is for living and she always lived with intensity. And when somebody dies at 97 years old having lived its live with intensity from the beginning to the end we should not be sad.

I could start and nonstop because he the occasion worth it the chance, but I have thousands of things on the top of my head ... and I'm not able to sort them. So I prefer you to speak, hers "blogueriños” (as she used to call her bloggers friends).

Wherever grandmother could be, she will read all the comments, she won’t leave one without read, that's for sure! Some will makes her laugh, others learn new, and she will get mad with the "bad language" ... but happy reading all of them.

This blog is just finishing here but it will in another format wherever she is. It will be a different format, which still we cannot read. But make clear that sooner or later all of you end up reading.

Friday, May 22, 2009

I'm pissed. And for that reason I cannot really formulate a coherent response to this pile of fail:

[partial transcript starting about 1:45] Mohr: I'd like to talk about the basketball playoffs, I'd like to talk about "King" [LeBron] James, this guy could actually be greater than Michael Jordan. I'd like to talk about Kevin Garnett. This guy's the Michelle Obama of the Celtics: he doesn't really do anything, but damn, he looks good, doesn't he, Jim? Michelle Obama—that is a big dude. When Barack plays pick-up games at the White House, you know he picks Michelle as at least his forward, maybe his [center], depending on who's in Congress that day. That has to be like being married to Elton Brand. She is a big. dude. I like when she put her arm around the Queen of England and she put her in a headlock and told her, "I've been waiting 200 years to put my arms around you, lady!" I love that. I like how she shaved off all her eyebrows, and then drew them back way too high into an arch and then straight back down, so she always looks super surprised. She kinda—Michelle Obama kinda looks like the Count on Sesame Street, that's great. [mimicking the Count] "One, ah, ah, ah. One black President, ah, ah, ah."

Luckily though, there are a couple of people that have an appropriate reaction.

Real classy way to treat the First Lady — but if you ask me, Jay Mohr has always been about as funny as a week-old sack of dead rats. He’s clearly whipping out his most tired material for Rome’s sports-radio army of clones, too. Scott Madin noted over at Shakesville that there are even more racist, transphobic jokes (somehow related to steroids and gynecomastia, I guess?) later on in the clip, at about 3:30.

Rome's website is here, and it looks like at least one of his features is sponsored by Chevy. According to Wikipedia, he's syndicated by "Premiere Radio Networks, a subsidiary of Clear Channel Communications," and also hosts a show on ESPN. Judging from the clip, I'm guessing writing to Rome's show will not be productive, but contacting Clear Channel, ESPN, and/or advertisers (in a quick search I wasn't able to find out anything about other advertisers, but Chevy's contact page is here) might be more effective.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

America's poor donate more, in percentage terms, than higher-income groups do, surveys of charitable giving show. What's more, their generosity declines less in hard times than the generosity of richer givers does.

"The lowest-income fifth (of the population) always give at more than their capacity," said Virginia Hodgkinson, former vice president for research at Independent Sector, a Washington-based association of major nonprofit agencies. "The next two-fifths give at capacity, and those above that are capable of giving two or three times more than they give."

Indeed, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' latest survey of consumer expenditure found that the poorest fifth of America's households contributed an average of 4.3 percent of their incomes to charitable organizations in 2007. The richest fifth gave at less than half that rate, 2.1 percent.

In terms of income, the poorest fifth seem unlikely benefactors. Their pretax household incomes averaged $10,531 in 2007, according to the BLS survey, compared with $158,388 for the top fifth.

In addition, its members are the least educated fifth of the U.S. population, the oldest, the most religious and the likeliest to rent their homes, according to demographers. They're also the most likely fifth to be on welfare, to drive used cars or rely on public transportation, to be students, minorities, women and recent immigrants.

However, many of these characteristics predict generosity. Women are more generous than men, studies have shown. Older people give more than younger donors with equal incomes. The working poor, disproportionate numbers of which are recent immigrants, are America's most generous group, according to Arthur Brooks, the author of the book "Who Really Cares," an analysis of U.S. generosity.

What makes poor people's generosity even more impressive is that their giving generally isn't tax-deductible, because they don't earn enough to justify itemizing their charitable tax deductions. In effect, giving a dollar to charity costs poor people a dollar while it costs deduction itemizers 65 cents.

Which leads to the natural question some might be asking themselves- why are generous people poorer than stingy ones?